#RPGaDAY 2016, Day 12: The Next Game

The actual title of today’s prompt is “What game is your group most likely to play next?” That question makes a few assumptions, the foremost being that one plays in a single group.

Take a look at Rich Rogers. Inferring from his posts about gaming and invitations to game (or watch one being streamed), I don’t think he actually has a game group, just a whole bunch of gamer friends that come together to play stuff for a few sessions and then back to the pool. Or if he does have a game group, he has at least three, each with a revolving cast, maybe some regulars in each. (Rich, don’t tell me. I want to believe you live in a magical wonderland of gaming and one day you’ll open a retirement home for all us gamers who can mix and mingle and play throughout our golden years.)

I have my own home group: me, the wife, and the daughter. We’ve played a bit of D&D, a bit of ICONS. But that’s not a regular thing. I’ve been able to play a few games on Roll20, both with a larger group of five players and with small groups of three. I’ve been invited to pickup games to be played over Google Hangouts. There’s no real “group” that I would consider “mine”, like it was maybe six or seven years ago.

Even then, I had multiple groups. There was the weekly game at the house where we’d play pretty much anything. There was the bi-weekly game that was a Pathfinder adventure path.[1] There also was the monthly group at the open gaming event, and several one-shots at that event when that game series was over. I suppose the last time I had just one gaming group was about a dozen years ago, with that Shadowrun campaign with the Worst Player Ever.[2]

Given all that, the prompt for today should be “What game will you most likely play next?”

Man, I’m so looking at The Sprawl.

I’m a bit burnt out on criminals doing criminal things, but my cold, cybernetic heart is jonesing for more cyberpunk dystopian goodness. Now that I’ve read through the whole thing (and listened to Daniel write a bit about it on G+ right when Hamish appeared on Rich’s +1 forward podcast), I’m looking at that game. Looking so hard. Plus, there’s a “Touched” add-on that brings the fantasy elements of Shadowrun to The Sprawl.[3]

Also, there’s Shadowrun Anarchy, which looks like a more rules-light version of Shadowrun[4] but from the character sheets posted online and the reports from players at Gen Con and OH MY GOSH GO CHECK OUT BRIE’S POST, it seems like the GM role shifts from a “traditional GM role to more of rules arbiter, with the story being equally provided by the whole group.” It looks to be something that’s still game-y (weapons have damage ratings, there’s still calculations for Essence, and modifiers for skills involving adding dice and whatnot), but faster — just one opposed roll instead of the twelve steps to determine if a spell went off. More Cinematic Unisystem than Classic Unisystem, perhaps.

I’m anxiously awaiting that to drop. (I couldn’t get anyone to pick that up for me at Gen Con.) According to a freelancer that worked on the project, that’ll be “tantalizingly soon”. Oh! I see that selling a PDF of the Prototype booklet that was at Gen Con is “currently under internal discussion”. Joy!

Technically, it was “favorite illustration”, but this was right after “favorite writer” and “favorite publisher”, so I’m continuing to assume Mr. RPGaDAY meant “favorite illustrator”.

I’ve been working with John Wick Presents on the 7th Sea game line and our cover and chapter spread illustrator Shen Fei has been killing it. I mean, killing it. I’m looking over some of his artwork for Pirate Nations and there’s this one piece that’s all aglow with spooky blues and green with smugglers carrying boxes through a flooded cave and it’s just fantastic. Here, have some ships we used for Chapter 7 of Core.

Damn, that’s fantastic.

Also, Diego Rodriguez has been as awesome with landscapes. He did all the country section headers and most of the thinner horizontal images in the book. I wound up having to cut some of those country section headers for space[5], but here, I’m going to show you all of the Vodacce country header. The name of the file is “Vodacce Lights”.

I didn’t come up with a good response for this last time around. “I may have to revisit this next year,” wrote yesteryear Thomas.

Screw you, yesteryear Thomas. I still got nothin’.

These two groups were so dissimilar. The weekly group was tech-savvy, texting each other and emailing to communicate; the fortnightly group did everything by phone calls. The weekly group would be cool with games that only lasted three or four sessions and didn’t involve combat at all; the other group wanted to play an old-school campaign from level 1 to level 20. The average age of the two groups? Only about five years apart. [↩]

Seriously, she was horrible. I told everyone I wanted a game where all the runners could trust each other and we’d make characters together, she shows up with a character designed to fuck over everyone else at the table and did just that, as often as she could. We took a break for a few months when she said she was moving out of state; when we reconvened, she was still in town — not that any of us knew this — and somehow found out that we were gaming without her, which led to a huge “fuck you, Thomas” email she sent to everyone in the group. A horrible, self-centered person. [↩]